- SAP Managed Tags:
| The SAP Community Expert Interview Series highlights key strategic topics, such as emerging technologies, learning, and other topics, and provides insights from industry experts and leaders on turning ideas into innovative approaches that impact people, process, and technology. |
A popular Haitian proverb has a universal theme, “Dèyè mòn, gen mòn,” which translates to “Beyond every mountain, there's another mountain.” ⛰️
As the business world and technology evolves, there is always something new to consider, or another mountain to conquer. It’s vital to keep up with emerging technologies and compelling trends.
Given the realities of continuous change, individuals and organizations should consider what’s next when assessing learning and development opportunities to stay ahead of the curve.Today, there is a huge opportunity for non-programmers and advanced coders to leverage Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) apps for a range of outcomes including mobile, desktop, browser, and TV using intuitive, visual drag-and-drop experience with zero (or near zero) lines of code.
For pawan.kumar08, SAP Community top contributor, SAP Development Consultant, and recent graduate of the Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) Applications and Automations certification, he knows first-hand about the importance of continuous learning, assessing what’s next, and climbing one mountain of opportunity at a time.
Enjoyed catching up with Pawan from his home office in Delhi, India.
Stephanie De Camara Marley (SM): Hi Pawan! As member of the SAP Success Delivery Centre, you and your team provide expertise supporting customer innovation, emerging technologies, and leveraging R&D environments. How does this Center of Excellence (CoE) inspire you in your role as an SAP Development Consultant?
Pawan Kumar (PK): I must say that’s a great question. I have always had a fascination towards technology starting with my university days, as my major was Computer Science, where I got to learn a lot.
However, from my career journey addressing technology solutions with leaders like Infosys, Sopra Steria, EY and now SAP, I can see the real value emerging apps and tools brings to organizations, customers, and beyond.
This realization pushed me more to learn new technologies and leverage them by implementing innovative solutions for customer’s success.
As a team member in a CoE environment here at SAP, I get various opportunities to learn emerging technologies and work on them with industry experts which keeps me motivated and inspired.
SM: Congratulations on your recent certification: “SAP Certified Citizen Developer Associate – Low-code/No-code (LCNC) Applications and Automations.” You have great technical expertise, for example with SAP Transportation Management (great blog!). What topics interested you the most in the certification (e.g., Building a LCNC Mobile App, Extension with SAP AppGyver, SAP Process Automation, SAP Work Zone, all of them, etc.)? Why?
PK: Thank you! After completing the certification, I can say that all the topics are equally interesting in the learning journey of the certification, but if I have to pick the most exciting one out of them, it would definitely be building a LCNC Mobile App. 📱
At the onset of my career, I’ve developed apps with coding language like SAP ABAP and it would take days to finish one app, but with the capabilities of LCNC, it hardly takes few hours to develop a mobile app with no prior experience in coding. Isn’t that exciting and cool!
You could have an idea, and it can be built into an app within a day…!
SM: How did hear about this low-code/no-code certification?
PK: New technologies always excite me, so when I learned that SAP had acquired a LCNC platform SAP AppGyver, I tried exploring it within the community edition. I found it really interesting and dug deeper into it; that is when I came across this certification on the learning portal (Free SAP Online Courses | SAP Learning) of SAP.
SM: Very cool that you applied your low-code/no-code knowledge into a Retail Store App with SAP AppGyver as part of the LCNC Community Challenge. What motivated you to select this use case (or scenario)?
PK: As I’m part of the Consumer Industries practice within SAP, it was an obvious choice to develop something around retail or fashion, so I picked up a use case which involved the daily operations of a retail store executive.
Since these executives need to perform activities, such as check customer orders, count inventory, etc., during their daily operations, a mobile app built with a low-code/no-code platform will make their life easier and hassle-free. Also, this helps in running the operations of the store smoothly.
SM: Do you see opportunities for advanced programmers (and proficient coders) to team with citizen (business) developers to collaborate and deliver LCNC proof of concepts and large-scale solutions? For example, possibly around insights into tricky technical challenges, company governance and processes, and portfolio management to reduce duplicate efforts.
PK: Of course, citizen developers have a lot to contribute to deliver LCNC solutions since it requires minimal or no effort of coding. Since they understand the intricacies of the business way better than proficient developers, I feel they need to play a leading role.
And as a first step towards this journey, delivering / developing some proof of concepts is critical and for some advanced solutions, they can team up with proficient developers who can support with the integrations or whatever coding may be required for the solution.
In terms of business areas, I think the scope of LCNC apps ranges across all industries and it can help the business run simpler, better, and faster.
SM: Going forward, are you using (or planning) more LCNC apps? Do you see further opportunities such as developing more efficiencies, enabling more employees to automate tedious tasks, and simplifying work?
PK: I’m exploring AppGyver these days. Yes, I plan to explore more apps in this space preferably next year.
In terms of opportunities, I see a great future ahead for businesses with LCNC apps. Businesses and their people have lots of bottlenecks in their day-to-day activities with manual and tedious tasks. LCNC apps have a great potential to address such obstacles by automating certain activities to ensure high productivity and efficiency for the business.
I strongly feel that the future belongs to citizen developers and LCNC platforms and apps, which have a critical role to play in the journey of building enterprise-ready custom software without writing code.
What's next:
- Follow pawan.kumar08#overview in the community
- Learn LCNC for free
- Get LCNC certified
